SEO Google Doodle 2012 Olympics

In case you’ve missed it, Team GB have been doing quite well at the ‘Games of the XXX Olympiad’ and are currently sitting in third position on the medal table with 25 gold, 13 silver and 14 bronze giving us a total of 52 medals. This has already beaten the total medal haul from Beijing four years and with three more days of events before the closing ceremony on Sunday night, there are still plenty more opportunities for Team GB to add to their medal tally.
This week Google has been giving all searchers their own chance at striking gold with a number of fun interactive Google Doodles. There had already been a number of themed Doodles to celebrate the Olympic Games but this week was the first time they became interactive. It’s great to see Google embracing the Olympic Games and creating fun ways for people to engage with different sports.
In honour of the Olympics Google Doodle, the HeadRed SEO team partook in the SEO Google Doodle Olympics 2012. Featuring the events of hurdles, basketball, slalom canoe and football, each event tested the dexterity of participants fingers with each sport requiring alternate pressing of the keyboard arrow keys, timed presses of the spacebar and precision direction in the quest for Google gold. You can see how we got on below.

After totalling up the gold, silver and bronze positions for each sport, David came in the overall gold performance, Joe took the silver and Tom went home with the bronze. Great effort from the guys…or a good waste of time depending on how you look at it.
The Google Doodle is often the first thing many people see when they log onto their computers in the morning as the search engine is often set as many people’s homepage. To have something new and engaging to interact with is a great way to get users talking about Google and and the sports were trending on Twitter during the week as people discussed and shared their top scores. Of course Google also used this as an opportunity to push their own social network with the ability to share your score on Google+ after each attempt.
Internet users like an interactive experience on the web so it’s important to consider this for your website and social media pages. Interaction and engagement can be achieved in a number of ways; asking questions, encouraging commenting, running competitions and ‘liking’ are all ways a user can engage with your site and your brand. This engagement also leads to sharing of your content, as the Olympic Google Doodle has shown, through retweets, reposting and ‘likes’ and this not only increases exposure for your brand but can also have positive effects for an SEO campaign and your search engine rankings.
So the challenge has been laid down by the HeadRed SEO team. Head on over to the Google Doodle archive, flex those fingers and get keyboard mashing as you go for gold in the Google 2012 Olympics.